The Most Powerful Idea in the World

by William Rosen

  For millennia, the hands controlling those heddles and shuttles were overwhelmingly female, as, indeed, were the artisans spinning the weaver’s yarn. When the fourth-century church father Saint Jerome recommended the craft for his female parishioners as an inoculation against the idleness sure to lead Eve’s daughters into temptation, he was giving a Christian spin to the same occupation that Penelope used to keep her suitors at bay a thousand years before. By the sixteenth century, however, weaving had become the prototypical cottage industry: diffuse, traditional, and decidedly low-tech. It would remain so for two centuries. As with metalworking, toolmaking, and a dozen other crafts that had experienced a thousand years’ worth of occasional innovation, the textile industry was able to enter into a cycle of sustainable invention only in the early eighteenth century.

  THE CYCLE BEGAN WHEN John Kay, the fourteen-year-old son of a Lancashire farmer, was apprenticed to a maker of reeds (the devices used to separate the threads of a warp, usually made of cane, or reed). In legend at least, Kay left after a single month, convinced he had learned everything he would ever need to know. It seems likely that he didn’t know everything, since it was eight years later, in 1726, that his first invention appeared, an improved reed that used wire instead of cane. He never patented19 what soon became known as “Kay’s Reeds,” but it was certainly not out of any antagonism to the principle of patenting. In 1730, he acquired a patent for a method of preparing the twine used for looms, and three years after that, one for a machine for dressing wool. More significantly, in the same year, Kay patented a new shuttle that was initially known as a wheel shuttle, then a spring shuttle; no one called it a flying shuttle until 1780.

  Before Kay’s invention, looms had been operated by weavers passing the shuttle, which carried the weft, through the warp threads by hand. As a result, any loomed cloth was going to be about the width of a human wingspan. By putting the shuttle on wheels and attaching cords to either end, Kay’s invention permitted it to “fly” by pulling the cord in either direction. It would take another fifty years for its use to become widespread, but despite its relatively leisurely adoption, the flying shuttle made Kay, if not wealthy, then at least prosperous; in 1738, he described his profession as that of “inventor,” but by 1745, had promoted himself to the status of “gentleman.” In 1747, he moved to France, where policies toward invention and inventing were as capricious as they had been in England under the Tudors: Inventors in good odor at the Bourbon court20 could be rewarded with pensions, loans, production subsidies, exclusive franchises, and even titles. Kay was able to receive a French “patent” on his shuttle just as his English patent was expiring, and in 1749 a pension.

  Kay may have seen himself as a gentleman, but he never stopped inventing. In 1738, he patented a windmill that successfully competed with Newcomen’s atmospheric engine in raising water from mines; in 1745, a loom whose spindles were coordinated by treadles, thus permitting the weaver to keep hands free; and in 1754, a new machine for making the cards used to store weaving designs. He spent so much time, in fact, traveling from France to Britain and back again in order to defend his patents that the French government revoked his pension in 1760 (though they restored it in 1770).

  Without minimizing the importance of his inventions, Kay’s posthumous reputation, as changeable as a couturier’s hemlines, may have even more to say about the special character of the Industrial Revolution in England. Though his death in France occurred in such vague circumstances that even the year cannot be established precisely, a hundred years later, by the 1880s, the critical importance of textile mechanization in the making of what was newly called the Industrial Revolution was so obvious that he, and other clothmaking pioneers, were being lionized in both English and French biographies. When the times, and the culture, demanded a hero, Kay, a Central Casting dream for the part of the brilliant inventor denied credit, was made to fit the bill, and his reputation has risen and fallen regularly ever since.

  That is not, however, the case with the flying shuttle itself, which indisputably revolutionized the craft of weaving. It didn’t do so by making the skills of the artisan redundant. Quite the opposite, in fact. Kay’s flying shuttle made it possible for weavers to produce a wider product, which they called “broadloom,” but doing so was demanding. Weaving requires that the weft threads be under constant tension in order to make certain that each one is precisely the same length as its predecessor; slack is the enemy of a properly woven cloth. Using a flying shuttle to carry weft threads through the warp made it possible to weave a far wider bolt of cloth, but the required momentum introduced the possibility of a rebound, and thereby a slack thread. Kay’s invention still needed a skilled artisan to catch the shuttle and so avoid even the slightest bit of bounce when it was thrown across the loom.

  The significance of this fact for industrialization21 was twofold, and instructive. The initial impact of Kay’s invention was an increase in the productivity of Britain’s weavers—enough of an increase that they were able to weave all the yarn that they could get in less time than ever before. And they could do it by hand. Though power looms had existed, at least in concept, for centuries (under his sketch for one, Leonardo himself wrote, “This is second only to the printing press22 in importance; no less useful in its practical application; a lucrative, beautiful, and subtle invention”), there was little interest in them so long as virtually all the available yarn could be turned into cloth in cottages. This fact reinforced the weaver’s independence; but it also encouraged another group of innovative types who were getting ready to put spinning itself on an industrial footing.

  The first tools for spinning are not quite as old as the first looms. For millennia, the device used to make yarn consisted essentially of two simple sticks; one, the distaff, held the unspun fiber, while the other, the spindle, imparted twist as a pitchfork-shaped flyer wound the fiber around its “tines” and into yarn, with all the twisting and rotating done at different, though proportionally related speeds. The first wheels used to mechanize23 the process by turning the spindle at a consistent rate were probably invented in India during the fifth or sixth century CE, and made their way to Europe around the end of the first millennium, though the earliest documented European spinning wheel can be dated only to 1298.

  The significance of the spinning wheel is as large in the history of mechanical invention as it is in the history of textiles; it was not merely the first machine to transmit power via a belt, but after 1524, when Leonardo (surprise!) put wheel, crank, connecting rod, and treadle together, it was the first to do so with various parts of the machine revolving at different speeds. The bigger the wheel, the larger the demand for power; the wheels of the fourteenth century were spun by hand, by the sixteenth, by a foot treadle. Inevitably, more demand for yarn meant more demand for power, either animal, wind, water, or, eventually, steam.

  The first step in that direction was taken in 1738 by Lewis Paul, a onetime carpenter who patented a machine that cleaned and carded fiber and “put [it] between a pair of rollers,24 cylinders, or cones, or some such movements, which being twined around by their motion, draws in the new mass of wool or cotton to be spun, in proportion to the velocity given to such rollers, cylinders, or cones; as the prepared mass presses regularly through or betwixt these rollers, cylinders, or cones, others, moving proportionally faster than the first, draw the rope, thread, or sliver to any degree of fineness”—a design that he improved with a new patent in 1758.

  The following decade, an even larger step was taken. At almost exactly the same time that Matthew Boulton was creating the Soho Manufactory, Henry Cort was building his puddling furnace, Joseph Black was investigating the properties of latent heat, and James Watt was repairing Glasgow University’s broken model of a Newcomen engine, a Lancashire weaver had his own Gestalt moment.*

  The year of James Hargreaves’s inspiration is a little vague—his daughter dated it to 1766—but not its character. While visiting a friend, Hargreaves observe
d a spinning wheel that had been knocked down; with the wheel and spindle in a vertical position, rather than their then-traditional horizontal one, they continued to revolve. In a flash, Hargreaves imagined25 a line of spindles, upright and side by side, spinning multiple threads simultaneously.

  Nearly fifty years later, the first description of the spinning jenny (“jenny” is a dialect term for “engine” in Lancashire) appeared in the September 1807 issue of The Athenaeum, in which readers learned that the first one was made “almost wholly with a pocket knife.26 It contained eight spindles, and the clasp by which the thread was drawn out was the stalk of a briar split in two.” The result is not just a romantic tale; the jenny immediately delivered an eightfold increase of the amount of yarn that a single spinner could produce. Just as immediately, the machine had customers—and enemies. Hargreaves’s daughter recalled that fearful hand spinners “came to our house and burnt27 the frame work of twenty new machines.”

  In June 1770, Hargreaves drafted an application for a patent (number 962) which read, “much application and many trials28 [produced] a method of making a wheel or engine of an entire new construction that will spin, draw, and twist sixteen or more threads at one time by a turn or motion of the hand and the draw of the other.” Those “many trials,” and, more significantly, the delay between the first (and very public) sales of the jenny and receipt of legal protection for its design, made for some serious problems. Lancashire’s cotton manufacturers* had been using the jenny for at least two years before Hargreaves got around to patenting it, and, under threat of losing their new best friend, they offered Hargreaves £3,000 for a license, which he evidently refused, seriously overplaying his hand. The fact that he had sold the jenny before patenting it severely limited his patent rights, and he died eight years later, comfortable, but not rich.

  Hargreaves’s experience was telling. Both ends of the clothmaking process—spinning and weaving—were dominated by artisans who defined their own interests in terms rather more complicated than a simple desire for wealth. Prior to the introduction of the jenny, Britain’s spinning was performed largely by what we would call independent contractors: the original cottage industrialists, taking raw materials from manufacturers who “put out” for contract the production of finished fabric.

  This was efficient—no huge capital expenses for the manufacturer, for example—but it contained within its organization what one might call a moral hazard. Since independent spinners worked for more than one manufacturer, they frequently juggled their contracts, delaying manufacturer number one in order to meet an order for number two. At its worst, this meant taking one manufacturer’s raw material and using it to produce goods for another, hiding the choice by making a flimsier yarn for both.

  The other half of the textile “industry” was no different. Like the lilies of the field, Britain’s weavers did not spin, nor did they toil, at least not more than necessary. They were proud artisans who not only wanted to control their work, but also were famously unwilling to work too hard at it. In the words of historian David Landes, “Weavers typically rested and played long,29 well into the week, then worked hard toward the end in order to make delivery and collect pay on Saturday…. Saturday night was for drinking, Sunday brought more beer and ale.” And it didn’t end there; one of their more rambunctious traditions was the custom known as “Saint” Monday, an ode to which appeared sometime in the 1780s:

  When in due course, SAINT MONDAY30 wakes the day,

  Off to a Purl-house straight they haste away;

  Or, at a Gin-shop, ruin’s beaten road,

  Offer libations to a tippling God….

  The attitude of the day suited spinners and weavers a lot better than it did the manufacturers who employed them. The obvious solution to their problems was to observe the artisans as they worked, which meant getting them out of their cottages and into factories. One of the more obdurate rules of economics, however, is that, given their capital demands, factories are preferable to more flexibly “outsourced” labor only if they are more productive.

  The place where they became so was the same one where the Lombes built England’s first textile factory: on the banks of the River Derwent.

  A TOUR GROUP DECIDING to engage a boat for a day trip along the Derwent might be forgiven for thinking that they had seen England change from a feudal to an industrial economy between morning and evening. Chatsworth Park, on the banks of the Derwent in Derbyshire’s Peak District, is one of the greatest estates in Britain; from the sixteenth century on, Chatsworth House was only one of the many homes of the Dukes of Devonshire, built at the center of the sine qua non of medieval wealth: thousands of acres of productive agricultural land cultivated by tenant farmers. Downstream from Chatsworth Park’s legendary gardens, the Derwent flows under a bridge even older than the dukedom, past the village of Darley Dale whose place in history marks another sort of wealth: Darley Dale was the home of Henry Maudslay’s assistant, Joseph Whitworth, who established the standard for English screw threads. From there, the river takes a series of U-shaped oxbow turns through a deep set of limestone cliffs and picks up some tributary streams, emerging into a valley with heavy vegetation on both banks, broken, about five miles south of Darley Dale, by a onetime factory now housing a museum and a shopping mall, a sprawling red brick behemoth known as Masson Mills.

  Masson Mills, and the Derwent Valley in which it was built, are, like the Iron Gorge foundries, recognized by the United Nations as an official World Heritage site. The reasons given by UNESCO read as follows: “The Derwent Valley saw the birth of the factory system, when new types of building were erected to house the new technology for spinning cotton…. In the Derwent Valley for the first time there was large-scale industrial production in a hitherto rural landscape. The need to provide housing and other facilities for workers and managers resulted in the creation of the first modern industrial towns.” The system, the buildings, the transformation of the landscape, and even the towns arose on the banks of the Derwent almost entirely because of the efforts of one man: the brilliant, and exceedingly controversial, Richard Arkwright.

  ARKWRIGHT WAS BORN IN Lancashire in 1732, to a family at the less prosperous end of the artisan scale—saddlers, tailors, shoemakers, and the like—who apprenticed him at age twelve to a slightly atypical trade. For six years, Arkwright studied the craft of barbering, though it didn’t take him long to realize that he could make considerably more money making hair than removing it. For nearly fifteen years, he was a maker of wigs, recalling, “I was a barber,31 but I have left it off, and I and another are going up and down the country buying hair and can make more of it.”

  No doubt he found the trade in hair pleasant enough, at least until 1767, when he met, in a pub, an itinerant clockmaker with the confusing (to historians, anyway) name of John Kay. This John Kay had nothing to do with flying shuttles, but he did have an interest in the other side of clothmaking, and he boasted to his new drinking companion, just as he collapsed over his last drink, that he could build a machine that would spin cotton on rollers. As both men later recalled,32 Kay woke up to find the onetime wig maker looming over him demanding a small model as proof of the clockmaker’s boasts.

  As would be subsequently revealed, Kay had invented the new spinning machine in much the same way that John Lombe had invented the silk mill. Given the rather fluid attitudes of the day concerning intellectual property, it’s probably too much to say that he stole the design, but he certainly borrowed it, from a Lancashire reed maker and weaver named Thomas Highs, who may even have a claim on the invention of the spinning jenny (Highs’s daughter, Jane,33 always maintained that it was named for her). Whatever his contribution to the jenny, he was clearly responsible for the design of the machine that Kay reproduced—from memory—for Arkwright, since two years before, Highs had hired the clockmaker to turn his wooden model into a working machine made of iron.

  Fig. 6: This is the diagram that accompanied Arkwright’s patent applicati
on, which became the 931st patent awarded by Britain, in July 1769. The rollers, on the right, teased out the fibers at different speeds, and were then given a helical twist by the wheel, on the left. The original power source was a horse mill driving a vertical shaft attached to a pulley; a belt, in turn, transferred the motion from the pulley to the spindles. Science Museum / Science & Society Picture Library

  The Highs design did have one unique and important feature. While Paul’s spinning machine had only one set of rollers, Highs’s had two, with the second rotating five times as fast as the first. The second rollers therefore stretched the original thread fivefold before the jennylike bobbin-and-flyer gave it the needed twist, producing thread that was both longer and stronger than could be produced by either hand or jenny.

  This was huge. English cotton was finally strong enough and long enough to be used not merely for weft but as warp thread, replacing both the more expensive linen and the Indian cotton that had been banned by the Calico Acts. Highs had invented the machine that would, more than any other, create Britain’s cotton industry.

  He did not, however, patent his creation, perhaps because he did not yet see the profit to be made from it. Richard Arkwright, however, did. In 1768, after keeping Kay sequestered in Nottingham for a full year, he applied for a patent, which was awarded in 1769, the same year that James Watt patented his separate condenser. Two years later, Arkwright and his two partners, Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt, started building, at Cromford in the Derwent Valley, the first factory to use the new spinning machine, which he named the water frame—“water” because Arkwright’s cotton was to be spun by harnessing the current of the River Derwent.

  It is scarcely surprising that Arkwright’s cotton mill was dependent on waterpower. Though Newcomen engines were by then familiar sights at mine shafts all over England, Britain’s waterwheels produced at least ten times as much power as steam did, and the source of rotary motion for the rollers in Arkwright’s water frames was a wheel set below a millrace off the Derwent River, harnessing not only water flow but gravity to deliver a nominal ten horsepower. It opened in 1771 and a year later was already a huge success, based on the enormous labor savings of the mill (as Arkwright himself wrote, “wee [sic] shall not want34 ⅕ of the Hands I First Expect.d”); the high quality of the cotton, which approached silk in its smoothness; and, as was predictably the case, Jedediah Strutt’s successful lobbying of Parliament to reduce the taxes on British-made cotton.